Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

September 27, 2010

They say you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince. Never was that so much the case than with Timmp which was, to put it mildly, poor. Take my advice and just don't bother with it. However, if you're tempted, read the rest of the review.

It starts off badly with an irritating background of some young lady pointing to the name. I get that it's called Timmp. I then clicked on the 'preferences' option, with safemode on or off and region. I then couldn't close the dialogue box; it only disappeared when I'd run my search, and I discovered that it had put Safemode back on again. In fact, every time I turned it off and ran a search, it turned it back on for me.

The young lady reappeared, this time to the right of the screen, with Timmp in another position, but it wasn't clickable, so was a total waste of time and space. The SERP (search engine results page) was poor - title, brief summary and URL. Nothing else. The engine gave access on one page to web, news, video, wikipedia and image results, which was fine, except that if I chose to click to another page of results in news for example the *whole* results page reloaded and I had to click again to get down to my news results.

No RSS. No help. No advanced search. Nothing, zip, nada. I looked at the 'About Us' page, and it's a work of genius. Never have I read so much pontificating rubbish in my entire life. Try this; 'Timmp is a new search solution changing the way that we search in our every day lifes'. No really, it's not. There's nothing new, interesting, innovative or unique there. 'Offering the ability to serve bespoke searches eliminating any unwanted material'. How? No idea. 'Timmp will revolutionise the global internet platform as a global village'. What does that even MEAN? And so it goes on. Rubbish.

September 24, 2010

Instant Search. It's an ok search engine, with a clean results page. It provides options to search Twitter, News (via Google news), Video (Via YouTube), Music (via Amazon), Pictures (via Flickr) and Products (via Amazon). No idea of what search functionality is available, but it does seem to support phrase and -exclude but no idea what else, since there's no help screen. No RSS options either. No 'About' either, so I can't tell you that much about them.

Their main claim is 'instant search', and yes, it's pretty quick, coming up with results of less than a minute ago, but that's nothing exciting as plenty of other engines do exactly the same thing.

Bottom line: there's nothing much wrong with it, but not much to really get excited about.

September 21, 2010

Bing Social now with added recommendations. Or not, as the case may be. The idea is that because there are so many people out there using social networking resources it can be really hard to find the right people to follow. Bing Social Search is supposed to help with that by providing suggestions for people that you can follow, based on the searches that you run.

This works wonderfully well with their self promotional example of 'Windows phone' but I have to say that I found it difficult to find any other examples. Library, Librarian, Libraries all came up with nothing at all. 'Web 2.0' gave me one recommended user. "Search engines'' gave me nothing. Even 'Bing' didn't give me anything.

September 19, 2010

It's looking like Cuil is no more. The website isn't coming up and the whole site looks to have gone offline. This isn't that much of a surprise since I didn't think much of it in the first place. Back when I first reviewed it in 2008 I said "this is so ineffectual that it's not going to be competing with Google -
ever. If people are looking for the elusive Google Killer they'd better
get used to the idea that it's not going to be this one." It doesn't give me that much pleasure to be proved right since I'm always on the lookout for good Google alternatives. The size of the database (in their case 127 billion pages) doesn't actually mean much, and I still think that a lack of good hard functionality says a lot about their demise.

I've read some rubbish in my time, but this article by the UK Editor of Wired entitled Six Reasons Why I'm Not On Facebook is right up there at the top. I did actually comment on the article but for some strange reason it didn't get past their moderation, so let me try here.

1. Private companies aren't motivated by your best interests. Of *course* they're not! Seriously - does anyone think that they are? They have one bottom line and that's money. Google is exactly the same - Google is there to make money for the owners and shareholders however it can. Do we see David Rowan whining on about not using Google? Does he stand grandly outside Tesco saying 'No, I shall not enter, this company wants to make money out of me!' I suspect probably not.

2. Facebook makes it harder to reinvent yourself. No David, *the net* makes it harder to reinvent yourself. It's not just Facebook, it's any social network, any website or webpage, any photograph sharing resource, any online database that's got data on you. GROW UP! If you are not happy with that concept, don't have anything to do with the net. It's that simple. He then goes on to ask if Robert Zimmerman could have reinvented himself as Bob Dylan. Of course he could - he could just have started another Facebook account and taken it from there.

3. Information you use for one purpose will invariably be used for another. We're next treated to an hysterical account of the invasion of privacy, yet even Rowan admits this isn't happening, just that it *could* happen.

4. There's a good chance information on a social network will be used against you. "A vindictive ex-partner or workplace rival.... may selectively expose information to your detriment" That can happen anyway, and it doesn't need Facebook to do that for you. I'd be more worried about the stuff that isn't on Facebook to be honest.

5. People screw up and give away more than they realise. People have been doing that for years, it's not Facebook specific. If someone has an open Facebook account and they start talking about cheating on their partner, that's their stupid fault, and if they're that thick they'll be talking about it in plenty of other places as well.

6. Why should we let businesses privatize our social discourse? I have no idea what he's rabbiting on about now. 'It's worth asking ourselves how far this "social utility" is really acting in the best interests of society." Newsflash! It's NOT. Anyone can see that - anyone who has been annoyed by Facebook allowing groups such as 'It's OK to hit women' and calling grubby murderers 'Legends' already knows this. Anyone who thinks otherwise is really living in cloud cuckoo land.

I really would have expected something better by the UK Wired editor, since this piece is just over the top hysterical illthought out nonsense. However, as a piece of linkbait I suppose that it's done it's job well.

September 16, 2010

The more that I play around with Google Instant, the worse it looks. There's a whole bunch of questionmarks over it. The Wonderwheel for example; it disappears when you use Instant. I like the Wonderwheel quite a lot. If you haven't seen it, run a search (with Instant turned off) and choose the 'More search tools' option on the left hand side of the screen. This will drop down and expand, giving you the opportunity to use it. It looks something like this:

Nice and useful - especially if you're reading around a subject, or want some search ideas. I was teaching a group of children earlier this week, and they rather liked it. Anyway.. run a usual search, and that's what you get. Use the Instant rubbish though, and you get offered this:

Instead of this:

Why? What's so different about the Wonder wheel in comparison to the Timeline? Could it <gasp, shock horror> be down to the fact that Google is pretty pants with a lot of this stuff? Surely not!

September 11, 2010

Bloglines, which is one of the 'senior' RSS readers (certainly it's the first one that I tried out and stuck with for a fair time) is being closed by Ask according to their Blog. Their focus is on building their Q&A offering, and with the increasing rise of Twitter and Facebook they don't feel that an RSS aggregator is worth spending time on. They are quite wrong of course - with the advent of resources like this RSS feeds are becoming more useful, not less and they're just a superb way of pulling content around the web. If anything, I make more use of RSS now than I've ever done in the past, and I need to read my feeds in something - such as, oh, I don't know - a newsreader for example?

I'm not surprised really, as Ask has a habit of dumping useful stuff and wandering down some path with a big 'Road Closed' sign on it. Mind you, Bloglines isn't what it once was - I stopped using it a couple of years ago and moved across to Google RSS Reader which was better, smoother, faster, less bug ridden and all told just a superior product.

Ask is giving users 3 weeks to move their content - which basically means pulling down an OPML file onto your hard drive and uploading it again to somewhere else - Google RSS reader probably. If you've stuck with Bloglines you'll be able to get the exact details from the website.

September 10, 2010

One of the things that you do if you spend a lot of time playing around with search engines is searching for porn. Hmm, on second thoughts, I could have phrased that slightly better. It's interesting to see how search engines deal with that sort of material - is a safe search really safe? Is any kind of censorship going on? You can see the point I'm sure. I'm guessing that any search commentor will admit to having their own list of 'naughty words' that they use. Of course, I tried a few of mine with Google Instant, and interestingly, Google stops becoming instant, and clams up entirely. Take this search for example:

Why Google, whatever do you think I'm going to search for? I was just going to see what 'nudge' meant, but I end up with an entirely blank screen other than what you can see above. It's also worth pointing out that I've got SafeSearch off, so I figure that it's my choice and responsibility over what I see, and Google isn't shy about providing me access to any number of sexual activities normally. Try it for yourself with some obvious terms, and it's really funny to watch the search engine virtually blush and clam up.

What's equally amusing is that Google is perfectly happy to make money out of these terms by selling advertising, as long (I suppose) they're not seen to be suggesting anything to you. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to see if Google Instant can suggest anything when I start typing in "two faced hypocritical moralistic search engine".

Unless you've been in a cave for the last few days you can't fail to have noticed that Google has made a radical change in the way in which the search behemoth is displaying results. Essentially when you start to type in your search terms Google instantly displays results based on what you've typed into the search box, it produces suggestions and tries to finish off your search for you with greyed out text.

As you'd expect, there are pro and con attitudes towards this development. Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of Search Products, said, "The
user benefits of Google Instant are many but the primary one is time
saved." Their blog post on the development states "Instant takes what you have typed already, predicts the most likely
completion and streams results in real-time for those
predictions—yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive,
predictive and powerful." Google estimates that users can save two to five seconds per search. It could also be argued that it allows people to change their search terms quickly - if you see the results coming up on the screen and they're not what you're hoping for, you can stop the search at that point, rethink the strategy and try again.

So - is this any good? Well, as you'll have seen, I've just mentioned the pro side, and I'm pretty much in the con camp; I don't like it. I don't regard this as a new and innovative way of searching, in fact I think it's a step backwards. While Google argue that Instant saves you time, I think it's going to be taking longer to search, as people need to stop, review what they're seeing on the screen and carry on. You could argue that you're ending up with better results and I think that's a very valid comment, and I find it interesting that Google is emphasising time saving rather than better results. There's virtually nothing in their blog post that talks about better searching, just faster. I certainly found the whole experience to be very distracting with results leaping up, suggestions flying in, grey text popping up in advance of what I was typing - way too much!

Good searching requires thought and a bit of planning - I'm sorry, but it does. What Instant does - as the name suggests, is give you instant results. Not better results, not good results, just instant results. The idea is that you don't need to finish your search, just accept what Google gives you. Now, if you trust in Google, in algorythms that give a high ranking for racist websites when searching for Martin Luther King, or poorly photoshopped pictures of Michelle Obama then you'll be happy. Google Instant is a huge step down the road of 'Google knows best'. Google doesn't know best, despite what they may like you to believe. It's a step away from social search in fact, which is what people are becoming interested in. Facebook is pushing into the search arena with the Like option, and for a lot of searches are you going to be happier finding stuff that your friends and colleagues think are interesting, or what Google assumes you'll like?

Google Instant stops you thinking - if it's making all these suggestions and it's very easy to just go along with what they suggest. This is going to be freaking out the SEO folks - I can already see their clients asking them to fix it so that their website gets a high ranking for 'mobi'. This is actually an interesting search - take a second and think for yourself where I'm going with that - chances are you'll be thinking mobile phone, and you'd be right. However, Instant is suggesting anything but that - Mobileme, mobile homes, mobile tv, mobile press register - but no mobile phones!

I'd have preferred it if Google had actually spent time improving the search functionality instead of messing around with what's essentially a gimmick. Despite this departure they're still lagging behind the competition in many areas. What Google is trying to do is stop you thinking and start accepting what they tell you. I don't think that's a step forward for anyone, except them.

However, that's now changing, and changing quickly. We're seeing librarians on the streets in Southampton and Doncaster (to name just two) who are protesting about closures. We've seen libraries bucking the trend that certain statistics would have us believe put libraries in terminal decline by increasing visits.

No-one wanted a credit crunch, or the results that we're now seeing of public services being drastically cut back. In fact in my own town in Essex they're dramatically reducing policing hours, and on the face of it, it's hard to argue to keep any services going when local policing is being cut. However, that's not a sensible way of looking at it, even if commentators on various newspapers are attempting to use that argument. However, how can we, in the field of libraries, librarianship and any other terms you wish to use really fight back, to prove the worth of libraries, to champion the values of librarians and to make the case for professionals running services?

Voices for the Library is doing just that. The tag line is simple and straightforward: "Promoting the need for and value of trained librarians within a free and open-to-all UK public library service." Here you can see stories that are being gathered together in one place - not just by librarians, but by people who use them. You can read about what some libraries are doing, such as Surrey Library Service's Children's Book Festival. The site also contains powerful short messages on why we need librarians, and how they work within society.

Voices for the Library is run by a group of dedicated, and in the main recently qualified librarians. They simply decided that they weren't going to take it any longer, and within a stunningly short space of time put the site together, utilised social media and have already had over 1,500 hits on the first day. Bethan, Gary, Ian, Johanna, Katy, Lauren and Mick should all feel very proud of what they've achived. (As a disclaimer, I'm also on the team, but my role has essentially just been to say 'Brilliant stuff' at appropriate intervals!)

Voices for the library is already getting a lot of good comments and suggestions. If you've got anything to add, want to volunteer, please let them know. If nothing else, please, please do visit the site - the more visits the more they can be shouted - and that's one set of stats that does actually make a difference!

[Edited to add in Bethan's name - many apologies Beth - I thought I was at the top of the 'meet the team' screen only I wasn't!]